DPQuant: Efficient and Differentially-Private Model Training via Dynamic Quantization Scheduling
This addresses the challenge of efficient and private model training for users handling sensitive data, offering an incremental improvement over static quantization methods.
The paper tackled the problem of quantization causing higher accuracy degradation in differentially-private SGD (DP-SGD) compared to regular SGD, and introduced DPQuant, a dynamic quantization framework that adaptively selects layers to quantize, achieving up to 2.21x throughput improvements with less than 2% accuracy drop.
Differentially-Private SGD (DP-SGD) is a powerful technique to protect user privacy when using sensitive data to train neural networks. During training, converting model weights and activations into low-precision formats, i.e., quantization, can drastically reduce training times, energy consumption, and cost, and is thus a widely used technique. In this work, we demonstrate that quantization causes significantly higher accuracy degradation in DP-SGD compared to regular SGD. We observe that this is caused by noise injection in DP-SGD, which amplifies quantization variance, leading to disproportionately large accuracy degradation. To address this challenge, we present QPQuant, a dynamic quantization framework that adaptively selects a changing subset of layers to quantize at each epoch. Our method combines two key ideas that effectively reduce quantization variance: (i) probabilistic sampling of the layers that rotates which layers are quantized every epoch, and (ii) loss-aware layer prioritization, which uses a differentially private loss sensitivity estimator to identify layers that can be quantized with minimal impact on model quality. This estimator consumes a negligible fraction of the overall privacy budget, preserving DP guarantees. Empirical evaluations on ResNet18, ResNet50, and DenseNet121 across a range of datasets demonstrate that DPQuant consistently outperforms static quantization baselines, achieving near Pareto-optimal accuracy-compute trade-offs and up to 2.21x theoretical throughput improvements on low-precision hardware, with less than 2% drop in validation accuracy.